The present invention relates to a video playback apparatus that plays back video data.
In recent years, due to multichannel broadcasting of video data resulting from digital television broadcasting and broad band networks, large amounts of video data have become acquirable or viewable. Also, due to improvements in video compression and decompression technology, reductions in the cost of hardware/software for realizing this, increases in the capacity of storage media, and reductions in the cost of storage media, large amounts of video data can be easily saved, so that the amount of viewable video data is increasing. However, busy people do not have the time required to view all of this video data. As a result, people have become inundated with viewable video data. Thus, it has become important to allow a viewer to view only the important scenes in the available video data, so that people can understand the content of the video data in a short period of time or be able to search for video data that they really want to view.
In light of this situation, technologies that can display important scenes in a large quality of video data have been introduced in JP-A 2003-153139 and in D. Dementhon, V. Kobla and D. Doermann, “Video Summarization by Curve Simplification,” ACM Multimedia 98, pp. 211-218, 1998 (Bristol, England). Particularly, in the available “Video Summarization by Curve Simplification,” technology is introduced in which a feature of video data is generated from the available video data, important scenes are extracted and ranked on the basis of the generated feature, and only the important scenes are played back at a ratio designated by the user. Due to these technologies, the user can grasp the content of the video data in a short period of time.
As described above, technologies have been proposed which allow the user to grasp the content of video data in a short period of time, but a user interface that is preferable for the user has not been proposed. For example, in the technology described in “Video Summarization by Curve Simplification,” the user can play back only the important scenes at a ratio designated by the user, but, in actuality, a designation is required for the time to view the content of the video data and to grasp the content of video data within a certain time. Also, in the technology described in “Video Summarization by Curve Simplification,” in the case where the user may want to grasp the fact that only the important scenes are being played back by looking at a gauge in which the position of an important scene and the current playback position are displayed, in actuality, there is the potential for this not to be preferable for the user because the display screen on which the gauge is displayed is complicated. Moreover, when only the important scenes are continuously displayed without implementing special means, it becomes difficult for the user to grasp the fact that only the important scenes are being played back.